"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action, how
like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the
world, the Parragon of animals!"
Thus did Hamlet describe Man's dignity in an exchange with
Guildenstern and Rosencrantz as the itinerant players were about to
make their appearance at Elsinore (Hamlet,
Act 2, Scene 2). In so speaking, Hamlet gave expression to the
traditional Judaeo-Christian concept of the dignity of Man, who in his
intelligence, his free will and his immortality-in a word, in his soul-is truly an
image of God. That was then; this is now. Today as the western world
increasingly turns its back on God, Man's own special dignity is
degraded. The more that, in the estimation of society, God comes to
count as nothing, the more does Man himself come inevitably to be
reckoned as the image of-nothing. In illustration of which, certain
recent successes scored in the field of law by the atheistic- or, at
the very least, the agnostic-Intemational Left come easily to mind as
straws in the wind, as ominous foreshadowings of an emerging legal
culture in which, even as animal "rights" are capriciously created,
human rights are demoted. One need go no further in search of an
example than Princeton University's Professor Peter Singer, a "big
name" in the Animal Rights movement as one of the founders of PETA, who
is also a notorious campaigner for abortion without restrictions. Going
ftuther than that, he is an unabashed advocate of parents' (and
society's) supposed "right" to kill a new-bom baby up to 30 days after
birth. (And what, one might ask, is untouchably sacred about the limit
of 30?).
In that excellent magazine the Weekly Standard-if you're trying to
think of a Christmas gift for that uncle or cousin or even mother or
dad whose preference runs to conservative causes, your problem is
solved-a recent article cited a number.of developments in a trend
towards reducing human dignity to a levels shared by the rest of the
animal- or even the vegetable-kingdom! I reprint Wesley J. Smith's
essay here.

Rights, properly understood, are moral entitlements
embodied in law to protect all people. They are not earned: Rights come as part of
the package of being a member of the human race. This principle
was most eloquently enunciated in the Declaration of Independence's
assertion that we are all created equal and are endowed [by our
Creator] with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
This doctrine of human exceptionalism has been under
assault in recent decades from many quarters. For example, many bioethicists
assert that being human alone does not convey moral value, rather an
individual must exhibit "relevant" cognitive capacities to claim the
rights to life and bodily integrity. [Cf. The Terri Schiavo murder].
Animal Rights ideology similarly denies the intrinsic value of being
human, claiming
that we and the animals are moral equals based on our common
capacity to feel pain, a concept known as "painience" [a
neologism that for those who revere the grandeur of the English tongue
may be construed as cruel and unusual punishment]. These
radical agendas have now been overtaken by an extreme environmentalism
that seeks to-and this is not a parody--grant equal rights to nature.
Yes, nature, literally and explicitly. "Nature rights" have just been
embodied as the highest law of the land in Ecuador's newly ratified
constitution pushed through by the country's hard-leftist president,
Rafael Correa, an acolyte of Hugo Chavez.
The new Ecuadorian constitution reads: Persons and people have the
fundamental rights guaranteed in this Constitution and in the
international human rights instruments. Nature is subject to those
rights given by this Constitution and Law.
What does this co-equal legal status between humans and
nature mean? Article I states:
Nature or Pachamama [the Goddess Earth], where life is reproduced and
exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its
vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
This goes way beyond establishing strict environmental
protections as a human duty. It is a
self-demotion of humankind to merely, one among the billions of
life forms on earth- no more worthy o fprotection than any, other
aspect of the natural world.

Viruses
are part of nature. So, too, are bacteria, insects, trees, weeds, and
snails. These and the rest of Ecuador's flora and fauna all now have
the constitutional and legally enforceable right to exist, persit, and
regenerate their vital cycles.

The
potential harm to welfare seems virtually unlimited. Take, for
example, a farmer who wishes to drain a swamp to create more tillable
land to better support his family. Now, the swamp has
equal rights with the farmer, as do the mosquitoes, snakes, pond
scum, rats, spiders, trees, and f ish that reside therein.

And since draining the swamp would unquestionably
destroy "nature" and prevent it from "existing" and "persisting." one can conceive of the
farmer--or miners, loggers, fishermen. and other users and
developers of natural resources-being not only
prevented from earning his livelihood, but perhaps even being charged
with oppressing nature.

The
inspiration for Ecuador's granting of rights to nature was an AMERICAN
extremist environmental group called the Community Environmental Legal
Defense Fund (CELDF), which presses to "change the status of ecosystems
from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as
right-bearing entities." The [Ecuadorian] constitution,
moreover, explicitly empowers organizations like CELDF to enforce
nature's fundamental rights. Article I states:

Every
person, people, community, or nationality, will be able to demand the
recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies [i.e.,
courts, governmental agencies, etc.].

If
the Ecuadorian government fails to protect the rights of the swamp
(or the trees, the animals on the mineable mountain, the schools
of fish. etc.), any
radical environmental organization can descend on Ecuador and sue
to thwart the desires of the farmer and prevent him from deciding what
to do with his own land. The mind simply boggles.

The
mainstream media have ntade no attempt to sound the alarm about the
dangers of this agenda. A New
York Times environmental blogger was bemused by the Ecuadorian
constitution, and an
editorial in the Los Angeles Times found Ecuador's proposal to make
nature the moral equal of people "intriguing.".

And
it is not just in Ecuador that THE INTERNATIONAL LEFT has demonstrated
its determination to devalue humankind in law and ethics. Just this
year:

¶ The Socialists and Greens in Spain are on the
verge of granting the rights to life, liberty, and freedom from
torture to great
apes and devolve humans into a "community of equals" with
chimpanzees and gorillas.

¶ The European Court of Human Rights recently
accepted a case out of Austria that
appeals a ruling that refused to declare chimpanzees legal persons.

¶ Switzerland has
constitutionally established the instrinsic dignity of individual
plants, based on the many similarities they share with us at the
molecular and cellular levels.

Some might say that Ecuador is a small country not worth
much concern. But
the concept of nature possessing rights seems to be spreading. The
CELDF-which was only founded in 1995-brags that it is fielding calls
from South Africa, Italy, Australia, and Nepal, that last of
which is crafting its own leftist constitution.

Others might say that worrying about nature's rights
should take a back seat to less abstract concerns such as the
financial crisis and the war on terror. But consider this: The central importance
of human life is the fundamental insight undergirding Western
civilization. This tenet is now under energetic, and increasingly
successful attack. If such anti-humanism prevails, we won't have
to worry about
nature having rights but about human beings losing
them.